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What a £500 website actually includes
Our website band, item by item: what the starting price buys, what you own at the end, and what moves a job into the next band.
Our pricing says websites start from £500. That is a fair thing to be sceptical about, so here is what it buys, item by item, and the point at which a job stops being a website and becomes something else.
What is in the website band
- Bespoke design, never a template. The site is designed for your business. It does not start life as a theme somebody else is also using.
- A full year of hosting and SSL, for reasonable usage. The site is live and served securely from day one, and the first year is in the price.
- Pages you edit yourself. You change your own words and add content without touching code and without asking us.
- A multi-step enquiry form, not a contact box. A few short questions instead of one empty box, so the enquiry you receive already says what the customer wants. The brief on this site works the same way.
- A news section, a gallery and WhatsApp chat.
- Your Google reviews, pulled in live. The reviews customers leave on your Business Profile appear on your site without anyone copying them across.
What comes as standard
These are not extras for bigger jobs. Every band, the website band included, comes with:
- Technology advice included
- A fixed quote after discovery
- Milestone payments
- Daily backups
- Full IP transfer on final payment
Before you pay anything
Discovery comes first: we keep asking questions until we understand what the site has to do, and that time is not billed. Then you get a prototype — something real to click through, before any money changes hands. No deposit, no contract. If it is not right, you walk away.
A website usually takes one to two weeks, and you get a milestone timeline before you commit to anything.
After the first year
Year one of hosting is included. What it costs after that depends on how much your site actually uses, so we work it out with you at the start and put it in your proposal in writing. There is no surprise invoice in month thirteen. The included year covers reasonable usage for a site of the size agreed in your proposal. If your traffic or storage grows well beyond that, we tell you what the extra would cost before it arises, and you choose whether to pay it or move the site to hosting of your own.
When it becomes a web application
A website is something people read and contact you from. The moment people need to log in and do something, it is a web application, and that band starts from £2,000. Signs you are there:
- Customers or staff need their own login, with different people allowed to see different things
- Bookings have to check real availability
- Customers pay by card online, or you want invoicing built in
- You need an admin dashboard and reporting
- Emails or texts should go out automatically
If you are not sure which side of that line you are on, that is normal. It is what discovery is for, and for a website it costs you nothing.
Who owns it at the end
You do. On final payment the code, the repository, every credential and the intellectual property transfer to you in full. It is written into our terms, not offered as a favour.